


to think that we could stay the same

by moonrocks



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Missing Scene, Or Is It?, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonrocks/pseuds/moonrocks
Summary: Nacho was quiet when they were kids, but he’s even quieter now. That silence used to be intimidating, a sign of self-control that demanded the submission of every dealer that crossed him. Now, his silence is so much heavier, warped by something Domingo can’t put his finger on.
Relationships: Domingo "Krazy-8" Molina/Ignacio "Nacho" Varga
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	to think that we could stay the same

**Author's Note:**

> Softboy Domingo Molina is the boyfriend Nacho needs but not the one he deserves.
> 
> Can you believe this is titled after a Mitski lyric. I'll see myself out.

Domingo hears about what happened in pieces.

It trickles in during drop-offs at the stash house and check-ins with the street-level distributors. Blingy and Javier heard it from Mouse who heard it from Arlo who heard it from God knows where. Meanwhile, Carlos knows a skell who knows another skell who had a run-in with the beat cop who found the car burned out in the desert. 

In this business, information spreads fast, usually exaggerated to the nth degree through junkie word of mouth. Domingo should know this by now, but the news still sets him on edge. He pretends to know more than he lets on, shrugging off every dealer who begs him for more details. He knows as much as they do, his information about the inner workings of the cartel cut off by his lack of seniority. The other dealers must think he has an in as the family friend of a Salamanca lieutenant, but Nacho barely speaks to him anymore. Unless Nacho is reprimanding him for fucking up a count or not being a hard-ass with his crew, their conversations inside _El Michoacano_ every week are few and far between.

All Domingo knows is this: the Espinosas took out a hit on the ABQ cartel operation. 

Arturo was killed in the ambush. And Nacho was shot.

Twice.

Domingo asks no questions when he gets called in to take over collection for the time being, and again when what he thought was a one-time thing becomes a two-time thing. He’s somewhat reassured when he hears the Espinosas were taken out in retaliation for the hit, by Marco and Leonel Salamanca no less. However, it matters little when he comes in for collection a third time and Nacho is still MIA. 

Having Nacho gone while he reels in the dealers and takes count is both a help and a hindrance. Without Nacho staring holes into the back of his head, Domingo feels more at ease. But as he counts and recounts, making sure there is not a dollar out of place or a teenth unaccounted for, he becomes painfully aware of what he will have to do if someone is short.

Nacho made sure Domingo knew the consequences.

Thankfully, no one tries it. Not this time. Not when the Salamancas just made an example of what happens when you cross the cartel.

Domingo counts each stack a second time after the dealers leave. He bands the money together flat, not rolled—a habit he acquired at the behest of Don Hector—then waits by the back door. He smokes half a cigarette while some Salamanca lackey pulls into the parking lot to pick up the money. He leaves Domingo with his cut, half of which he usually scrubs clean through Tampico. He used to leave his parents the money in an envelope in the mailbox, but his mom stopped accepting it, even when business was slow.

Before his obligatory weekend shift, Domingo stops by his parents’ house like he usually does. His mom is out, but there is a note on the kitchen counter in her familiar, cursive shorthand. 

_Mijo,_

_Lunch with Gloria. Give these to Manuel, please._

_\- Mamá._

Beside the note is a rumpled grocery bag full of several ripe tomatoes: red, shiny, and plump. He recognizes them from the garden his mom pays more attention to than the shop, irritating his father to no end. Domingo tucks the note in his back pocket, glancing out the kitchen window. From where he’s standing, he can see the driveway of Manuel Varga’s home across the street and two houses to the right. The net of the basketball hoop where he and Nacho used to waste away the weekend hours is old and ratty, swaying unused above the pavement. Manuel’s truck is missing from the driveway, but Domingo figures he can drop the tomatoes off on the porch and his mom can call Manuel once he gets home. 

Domingo leaves through the side door, locks up, and heads toward Manuel’s. The sun beats down on the sidewalk, the pea-green collar of his Tampico Furniture uniform stiff against the back of his neck. The porch creaks as he walks up to the front door. He fully intends to just leave the bag by the welcome mat, but then he catches a hand moving the curtains from the front window. Domingo frowns. Thinking maybe Manuel _is_ home, he rings the doorbell instead.

No answer.

He rings it again.

Nothing.

On his third ring, he realizes something. 

_Nacho._

The door swings open. Domingo tries not to look too surprised when Nacho appears in the entryway. He looks a lot more dressed down than he usually does: jeans, a t-shirt, no chain around his neck. His usual Rolex is missing from his wrist, replaced by the frayed, beaded bracelets he’s been wearing since high school. He looks better than Domingo thought he would, given the gory rumours that spread about his injuries. But that’s not really saying much. 

His face is drained from its usual colour, lips chapped, eyes bruised, broken blood vessels zigzagging around his nose like lightning bolts. His posture is overly stiff in the doorway. His body is padded where bandages have been wound around his abdomen and shoulder, their outline half-hidden by his shirt. Domingo tries not to imagine the state of the wounds underneath the gauze: the stitches, the blood, the torn skin.

“Nacho, uh, hi,” Domingo says with an awkward grin, one he usually saves for collection when Nacho is staring him down. “I didn’t know you were visiting your dad’s.”

“What are you doing here?” Nacho asks flatly. 

Domingo raises the grocery bag of tomatoes to his hip. “My mom wanted me to drop off some tomatoes for your dad. These are from her garden,” he explains. “She spends so much time back there I think my dad is really starting to get pissed off. But you know how he is.” 

Domingo forces a laugh. Nacho says nothing, only stares. Domingo clears his throat. He means to hand the bag over so he can get the hell out of there ASAP, but he hesitates. He glances from the bag to Nacho’s injured shoulder, then back to the bag. 

“Here, let me,” Domingo says and hesitantly steps inside. Nacho pivots, eyebrows creased above his dark eyes, but he lets Domingo in anyway.

The entryway is cramped enough that Domingo’s arm accidentally brushes Nacho’s chest as he makes a beeline to the kitchen. He sets the tomatoes on the counter, keeping his eyes only where they need to be, avoiding the family photographs on the walls or the recognizable trinkets that decorate the shelves. When they were kids, Domingo used to come in whenever he wanted: watching TV with Nacho after school, helping Manuel with yard work for a couple dollars, pretending to do homework with Nacho at the kitchen table. 

The house feels fragile but painfully familiar, like Domingo could breathe and the windows would shatter. Nacho closes the door and it fastens shut with a faint click. The television is on, the volume low, a commercial about pool filters humming in the quiet. Nacho hovers in the living room, his arms crossed. When their eyes meet, Domingo feels like a teenager again, watching Nacho—who was always much cooler than him in high school—sitting out on the porch with some girl, sharing a cigarette stained with strawberry lip gloss. Nacho would always stamp it out before Manuel could see them, hickeys left on his neck before the girl took off down the street. Domingo would stand there, wanting to go over, wanting to offer him another cigarette. Instead, he would close the window blinds.

“I heard what happened,” Domingo says, fiddling with the edge of the grocery bag. It crinkles underneath his thumb. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Nacho says dismissively. “I’d say I’ve had worse but I guess you’d know I was lying.” 

Domingo laughs, a real laugh this time. “Two gunshot wounds? Pfft, that’s amateur hour, man. Did they take you to the hospital?”

Nacho stiffens. “No, I had a connection.” 

“Right.” 

Silence falls between them. Domingo immediately feels like he said the wrong thing by suggesting a situation where Nacho could be questioned or even arrested. Nacho is much more careful than he used to be. Gone is the overconfidence and cocksure attitude Domingo had grown accustomed to since Nacho got deep into the business.

Nacho was quiet when they were kids, but he’s even quieter now. That silence used to be intimidating, a sign of self-control that demanded the submission of every dealer that crossed him. Now, his silence is so much heavier, warped by something Domingo can’t put his finger on. He’d always been curious about what it was like to be that close to the cartel, but what happened with the Espinosas reminds him what closeness like that costs. Whatever Nacho is into is too hot for Domingo. He no longer wants to know. 

“Well, collection is going good,” Domingo says. “No one has been light yet.”

“Good.” Nacho averts his eyes, lips pressed together in a line. A blink of recognition passes over his face, one that Domingo pretends not to see. Domingo wonders if there is guilt in there somewhere or if this is just a momentary lapse in Nacho’s facade, nothing more than a remembrance. 

Domingo changes the subject. “Everyone has been asking about you.”

“Have they?” Nacho seems unaffected by the gesture. He runs a hand down his face, then across the back of his shaved head. “What have you been telling them?” 

“Nothing really,” Domingo says. “When do you think you’ll be back to running things? Now that Don Hector is in the hospital and Marco and Leonel are back across the border, Don Eladio has to put you in charge, right?”

Nacho shakes his head. “I dunno about that, Domingo. Not sure the cartel wants an outsider having that much say on their side of the business.” He exhales, sort of a laugh, sort of a sigh. He returns his hand to the arm of his injured shoulder, supporting its weight while it hangs limply at his side. “You seem to be handling collection just fine on your own. Maybe you deserve my spot running it every week.” 

Nacho says it like it means nothing. Domingo narrows his eyes at him. “You sure?”

Nacho nods. “Yeah, why not?”

He rubs at his face again, then sits down on the sofa, wincing as his body shifts, undoubtedly stretching his stitches. He looks even paler than he did before, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Domingo frowns and moves away from the kitchen counter, stepping back into the living room. 

“Hey, you sure you’re feeling alright?” Domingo asks, hovering near the sofa. “You look like you have a fever or something.” 

“I’m fine,” Nacho insists.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Domingo says. “I mean, no offence.”

Domingo knows he should be scared of Nacho. Maybe if he was more worried about self-preservation, he would be. After what Nacho did to him at _El Michoacano_ , he knows he shouldn’t even be here, let alone be pestering Nacho while he has a hole clean through his abdomen. But right now, Nacho looks less and less like a Salamanca lieutenant and more like the kid across the street who was attached to his father at the hip and taught Domingo how to shoot threes. 

For the first time in a long time, Domingo remembers that they were friends once.

And with good reason. 

“Here, hold on a second.”

Domingo still knows his way around the house, the floor plan having imprinted on his memory by the time he was eleven years old. He walks down the hallway towards the bathroom, passing Nacho’s childhood bedroom on the right. The door is cracked open. Domingo can see inside for a brief moment. There are framed baby pictures on the bookshelf, childhood junk in bins tucked underneath the bed. Domingo can see remnants of sticky tack that used to hold posters onto the wall. An uninterrupted film of dust seems to coat everything but the bed, which is unmade and slept in. There is a faint stain on the pillowcase that looks like blood.

Domingo looks away. 

In the bathroom, he wets a face cloth with cold water then returns to the living room. He offers it to Nacho. “My mom used to do this when I was sick,” Domingo explains when Nacho looks at him skeptically. “Put it on the back of your neck.”

Nacho does as he’s told, draping the towel just above the lip of his t-shirt. It flattens against his skin. He leans forward with his knees on his elbows, his eyes fixed on the television but not really watching it. The infomercial that splits the screen is just somewhere inconsequential he can look. Nacho probably hates that someone below him in the business is seeing him like this, his guard down, his body cut up.

Domingo thinks of cost again.

Back when Nacho was just peddling crystal on the side, he had no ambitions other than helping his dad pay off the mortgage. There was only a suggestion of wanting something more back then—Domingo had felt the same way—but that changed. Nacho changed. 

Domingo sits down beside him on the sofa, leaving a cushion between them. The springs creak. The television drones. Nacho adjusts his t-shirt and Domingo gets a peek at the bandages around his stomach, a pink circle where the wound is.

“Does it hurt?” Domingo asks. 

Nacho smirks at his question. “Yeah, it hurts.” He lifts up his t-shirt again. “Did you want to see?” 

Domingo wrinkles his nose. “Not really, dude.” 

Nacho lets go of his shirt and the bandages disappear beneath it. “Right, I forgot you fainted in tenth-grade biology.”

He chuckles and Domingo is immediately taken aback by the sound of his laugh. He has no idea when the last time he heard it was.

“Only because I skipped breakfast,” Domingo says. He feels a juvenile blush creeping up the sides of his face. His eyes trace the line of Nacho’s abdomen. “So, what did it feel like?” 

Nacho looks over at him. “What? Being shot?” 

Domingo meets his eyes. “No, dying.”

Something heavy extends the space between them, the ease Domingo felt moments before evaporating. Nacho exhales slowly, then turns back towards the TV. 

“It felt like . . . heat,” he says. “I could feel my blood boiling in the sun as it dripped into the sand. I thought if the blood loss didn’t kill me, the desert definitely would.” Nacho pauses, thinking about something. Domingo doesn’t know what. “I was halfway delirious by the time they found me.” 

Domingo has an easier time imagining it than he hoped. Sure, he has had childhood broken bones, scraped knees from wiping out on his bike, cuts and bruises from high school fights, but the worst pain Domingo ever felt came from Nacho, slamming his face against the tiled floor of the restaurant, driving his foot into his ribs, breaking the two underneath his heart. Domingo amplifies that feeling, picturing the baby blue sky above Nacho as he bled out, the faintest breeze stirring the sand.

“What did you think about while you were out there?” Domingo asks.

“My dad mostly,” Nacho admits. “I was wondering if he would be glad to be finally rid of me.” Domingo clenches his jaw, working up an interjection, but Nacho keeps talking. “He always liked you, you know? Always thought you were a good kid. Bet he thinks I was a bad influence on you.”

Nacho lets out a humourless laugh. Domingo frowns. He wants to move closer to Nacho on the sofa, comfort him somehow, but he settles for consoling him with sympathetic eyes. 

“If anything were to happen to me, I could trust you to take care of him, right?” Nacho asks. “Make sure he has what he needs?”

Domingo feels his stomach sink with dread. His throat tightens. “Did something happen? Nacho, are you in some kind of trouble?”

Nacho shakes his head. Domingo thinks he sees moisture pilling on his too-long eyelashes. “No, all this”—he gestures towards his injuries—“just has me thinking. If something happened, I would want someone out there looking after him. Would you do that for me?”

“Yeah, sure, Nacho,” Domingo says. He swallows down the knot in his throat. “Of course.”

Nacho offers him an acknowledging look, then Domingo glances down at his wristwatch. “Shit, I should get going. My shift starts in thirty.”

He starts towards the door, but Nacho speaks up before he can leave.

“Hey, Domingo?”

“Yeah?” 

“If it means anything, I’m sorry about what happened,” Nacho says. “About what I did.”

It catches Domingo off guard like a fist to the stomach. His hand pauses on the doorknob. He never thought Nacho would apologize; there was never any expectation that he should, not in this business. In any other circumstances—circumstances not involving two gunshot wounds and a fever—Nacho probably would have left it unsaid. Domingo almost wishes he had.

“You did what you had to do.” Domingo shrugs, ignoring the sting behind his eyes. “I fucked up. I learned my lesson. No need to apologize, Ignacio.”

Domingo turns to leave, unlocking the latch and opening the door, but then Nacho is on him, crossing the space between the door and the sofa in one single stride. If Nacho hadn’t just apologized for beating the shit out of him, Domingo would assume he was about to do it again. It's the first thing that comes to mind when Nacho's closed fist comes down hard on the door, slamming it shut.

“You can’t say shit like that, alright?” Nacho says. “You can’t let anyone in this business walk all over you. You let your guard down for one second and these people—” He pauses, his jaw tensing. Domingo searches his face, which is so close to his own, and realizes that beneath all the anger is fear. Nacho is scared. “These people will not hesitate to kill you, Domingo. Do you understand? You or the people you care about.” 

“I understand,” Domingo says, willing his voice to be steady but shrinking away. “Please, Nacho, just let me go.”

Nacho falters at that, realization tempering his expression as Domingo looks at him with pleading eyes. Nacho takes a pointed step back and Domingo tugs the door open. He steps outside onto the porch, then hurries down the stairs to the sidewalk. Only once he gets to the other side of the street does he stop and look back. He sees Nacho in the doorway, a hand draped against his stomach, palm settled where his wound must be. He looks small and defeated—like a boy—and Domingo feels just as childish for running away. Nacho exits the house and sits down on the porch step, his head in his hands.

Domingo goes to him.

They sit beside each other on the steps, commiserating with the natter of the neighbourhood, arms brushing up against one another. Domingo removes a pack of Marlboros and a lighter from his back pocket and they share that cigarette he used to think about so much.

After the third or fourth drag, Domingo realizes something.

One of them isn’t making it out of this alive.

**Author's Note:**

> This was incredibly self-indulgent. They say you should write for yourself so I took this character who dies in episode 3 of Breaking Bad and only shows up a few times in BCS, who I am very weirdly and strongly attached to, and gave him 3k words. 
> 
> I love Domingo with all my heart. If anyone deserved better, it was him.
> 
> Anyways, thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought.


End file.
